What Nancy is Doing These Days

Two buckets of greens (turnips and kale, to be specific) from the garden and a glimpse of a pair of feet in green garden clogs.

When people ask what I’m up to work-wise, I vaguely mention my “rewirement.” I’ve been in the process of redesigning my “working” life into a more consciously designed life flow. In other words, I’m doing less “paid work,” and devoting more time, attention and prioritization of family, my own learning, playing my guitar and spending time in my garden.

What does this mean if you want to hire me? I’m only taking on 1-2 clients at a time. I’m done juggling many work balls, now reveling in a more spacious life. And I have three criteria for saying “yes.”

  • 1. Work that matters in the world. Is your project trying to solve for a community? The world? Does your work echo beyond an event or project? I’m interested.
  • 2. Great people. I’m deeply attached to who I am working with. This is a relationship, not a transaction. We are in it together long enough to supports relating to each other as people?
  • 3. Everyone’s learning edge. I’ll refer you to wonderful folks to provide you a known service. I’m interested in the edge where we all learning. Together. Further, we are committed to sharing that learning.

If you and your work resonate with this, let’s talk.

Rewilding Strategic Knotworking with Lynda Frost

A guest post by my friend and colleague, Philip Clark (bios at end of post for Philip and Lynda!)

Image of Lynda Frost

“Here is a test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: If you’re alive, it isn’t.” Richard Bach 

Within the larger Liberating Structures network there is a community of practice devoted to the development and understanding of Strategy Knotworking (SK), a set of six questions, often explored using various Liberating Structures (LS). SK lends itself to complex contexts and where there is a desire to engage everyone in planning. 

This is the third installment (here is the first, here is the second) of takeaways from the various conversations that we have been fortunate to have with seasoned practitioners on Strategic Knotworking (SK). The entry focuses on Lynda Frost.

One of Lynda’s distinctive professional marks is her vast competence and experience in both strategic planning and facilitating Liberating Structures (LS). In fact, when it comes to LS, she undoubtedly falls in Everett Roger’s “early adopter” category. Her use of LS is not only fluent, it can be pervasive.

So it is worth paying attention when she remarks that SK is not primordially a strategic planning tool. People familiar with prior blogs may remember that the issue of execution, or operational savvy or action planning were matters of concern for other practitioners as well. For Lynda, SK essentially serves to explore, share and socialize important, critical strategic content but is not geared to finalizing a written strategic plan. Other tools do it better. To use her own words, SK is a great way “to navigate the strategic process.” 

Different questions different insights, different LS different tones

New tools bring new questions and new outlooks. For instance, David La Piana – Lynda’s inspiration for strategic planning for her nonprofit clients – talks about Comparative Advantages [His exact expression is “competitive advantage” but Lynda prefers “comparative advantage”] i.e., the unique skills that an organization possesses which Lynda uses to articulate Context. 

This switch is not neutral since the notion of Comparative Advantage has deep strategic roots ever since Michael Porter’s article in 1979; more importantly it shifts the attention from external influences by linking them to internal capacities.

Lynda’s interview offers a wealth of insights. Here are 3 takeaways: 

  1. The importance of preparation (sponsorship, leadership, planning team, and the use of LS) 
  2. The centrality of Purpose and its extension to mission and values
  3. Insight about SK: a) with regard to strategy and strategy planning, and b) about the choice of LS. 

Process 

Like most significant consulting interventions, obtaining approval for a participatory strategic workshop usually involves a series of critical steps. Here are some elements worth considering. 

Step 1 with the executive team: the job consists in understanding the group dynamics, setting clear goals, checking for commitment, and evaluating the compatibility of the organization’s culture with the LS mindset among other things. 

One of the most important factor is group dynamics, that is the level of cooperation between people.  If an organization is marred with conflict, tension, infighting, any approach to collective action should start with some form of reconciliation. In this context, Appreciative Interviews because it describes situations at their best can be an effective structure to build (or repair frazzled) relationships while gaining substantive insights to inform the planning process. Group’s dynamics will also impact how groups will be formed: will they be a mix people and functions, or will they follow the organization’s chart?

Step 2 the Planning team: It’s function is to lay out the retreat’s purpose, structure, goals and participation. At this stage, it is key to have diverse perspectives within the group.

This is when Lynda will introduce LS both as a canvas (or metastructure) and/or as a set of tools. As it is, Purpose to Practice can provide the overall blueprint whereas individual LS will be used to address specific instances such as scoping, setting rules, principles, participation, etc. As a result, the planning team will be somewhat familiar with LS before the start of the strategy meetings.

Lynda will also walk the Planning team through more complex structures that she will use during the strategy sessions; often these include her two favorite LS : Ecocycle Planning and Critical Uncertainties (CU).

The Planning team should meet 2 to 3 times before a 1-2 day workshop to ensure thorough preparation. 

Step 3 facilitating the retreat: the intensive phase of the work is often an in-person or virtual retreat between a half day and 1.5 days over a weekend, with smaller online co-planning meetings leading up to the retreat and following up as a debrief and accountability tool.

It matters what matter matters 

The second characteristic of Lynda’s practice I chose to share with you concerns Purpose writ large. Purpose, you’ll recall, is step 1 in SK. It is also the 10th principle of LS “Never start without a clear Purpose” which, experience shows, especially resonates with nonprofit organizations. 

Lynda will spend a fair amount of time making sure a good purpose statement or mission statement will resonate with the participants. Like she says : “ I want them to really feel like they’re looking at that mission, they’re reading it and they’re thinking about it before we get into anything else.” 

To insure adhesion, she will avoid “mission or purpose language” preferring a more oblique approach. For example, she may start with something like “what is the fundamental value of your organization?” or “how did you first get involved with the organization?” or even, in cases where there are a number of new people in the room, with a prompt on their engagement to insure their inclusion and boost their confidence. 

If the group is small, she will use Impromptu Networking to gather stories, perspectives, ideas. If the group is larger, she will opt for 1-2-4-all. If it is online, she will favor Chatterfall . 

In a longer version, she will favor 9 word purpose statements over 9Whys. Purpose, mission or vision are so central for Lynda that her final report will rate each strategic initiative based on its alignment with the mission as well as other key criteria identified by the group [For example, a strategic initiative might be rated based on 4 criteria: the consistency with the mission, the organization’s competitive advantages, the organization’s capacity to implement, and the financial viability of the initiative]. 

Jamming with SK

Exploring new prompts

I said it several times before, one of the greatest feature of SK is its malleability. With Michelle, we saw that when an organization is fraught with tensions, history could provide a good basis for reconciliation. Context then is not just “What is happening around us that demands a fresh approach?” It can be “where do we come from and what has been lost that could be rekindled”. With Lynda, as we have seen, Context can become “what is/are our comparative advantage(s)?” In other words, “what is it that we do or have or built that is unique and attractive to our clients or users or beneficiaries?”

Mixing asynchronous and synchronous activities

Because time is precious and thinking slow, Lynda doesn’t hesitate to mix asynchronous work with synchronous activities. This is the case with the comparative advantage. Participants are asked to look at adjacent organisations prior to the workshop to get a sense of what they do differently. Once in the workshop with the content ready at hand, they can quickly discuss what makes them unique (smoother communications, quicker decision making, better delivery, etc.…) and converge using 1-2-4-all. 

Favorite structures

Lynda’s favorite LS for strategy work are Ecocycle Planning and Critical Uncertainties (CU)

As a rule of thumb, she wants to get Ecocycle up and running as soon as possible in the workshop, usually at the end of the morning. Ecocycle allows people to map their activities whether they are just talked about, getting traction, fully mature and running out of steam. It is all about doing. It can also level-set the group, informing newer members and giving long-term participants a place to gather historical and current initiatives.

CU will come in to get a broader view, and guide strategic planning, not just built resilience. One remembers that CU consists in two perpendicular axis. The first one is about uncertainty: what is most uncertain and what is less in your situation. The second is about criticality: again what is most critical and what is less. 

When working with nonprofit organisations, Lynda suggests money for the uncertain axis. In other words, will money be available or not. And for the critical axis, the policies in place; are they enabling or are they limiting. This brings a strategic layer to Ecocycle and allows for the selection of activities going forward according to the scenarii discussed in CU.

Keep it simple keep it moving

If I were to summarize Lynda’s approach to Strategy, the words that come to my mind  are “keep it simple, keep it moving”.

Simplicity starts with using the right kind of language. It then translates into the use of simple LS such Impromptu Networking, 1-2-4-all, Conversation Café. For example, 1-2-4-all can be used to determine the comparative advantages, the values of an organisation or even purpose, and/or its ambitions. You can also simplify the process by fully taking stock of what a given LS can give. For example, ambitions can also be derived from Ecocycle. And Conversation Café turns out to be very effective at identifying existing and emerging priorities.  

Now of course Lynda’s repertoire is much larger than this and she will, given the right opportunity, include User Experience Fishbowl  to bring lived experience into the process, and 25/10 and Shift and Share to decide on which initiative to pursue. More playful structures in development can serve other purposes. A favorite one is Drawing Monsters to address concerns or fears about changes associated with a new strategic plan.

The simplicity of these structures also allows for a nice rhythm to set in. But it seems to me that the real momentum is due to a focus on concrete actions from the get go. First, there is what can be called a standard operating model applicable to almost all small and medium nonprofit. Then there is the marriage of specific planning tools – themselves streamlined – with LS. For example, selecting priorities is made easier by the customized “strategy screen” measuring each potential initiative on a scale of 1 to 5  around key criteria such as alignment with purpose, enhancement of comparative advantage, feasibility, and financial viability.

The switch from Context to Comparative Advantage also emphasizes concreteness by zooming on known strengths and/or developing news ones. The way Critical Uncertainties is designed with its 2 distinct phases and its orientation towards operations definitely also leans toward action.

In fact, Lynda’s clients benefit from both world: the world of planning oriented towards actions and the world of creativity and collective intelligence brought by LS.

Our Guest and Guest Author

Lynda Frost, J.D., Ph.D. Lynda has lived and worked on four continents, but calls Austin TX home since 2003. She’s committed to helping foundations, nonprofits and other agencies maximize their impact in improving health, human services, education and criminal justice outcomes for the most vulnerable communities. She’s passionate about fair and effective process, with expertise in facilitating groups to maximize the engagement of each participant to apply what we know to make positive change on the ground. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/lyndaefrost/ )

Philip Clark: After running his company -a digital design firm – for 10 years, and the innovation department of Orange Business Services, Philip now teaches innovation and change  at the university of Applied Science in Lausanne Switzerland. He also facilitates organizational transformation with a special emphasis on complexity designed tools and methods (Liberating Structures, Cynefin, Estuarine, Sensemaker…) promoting collective intelligence and distributed leadership. Contact Philip to collaborate and share ideas (https://www.linkedin.com/in/philip-evans-clark/)  

Rewilding Strategic Knotworking with Fisher Qua

A guest post by Philip Clark
(Nancy’s Note: Philip and I are members of this little community of practice focusing on the use of Liberating Structures in strategic planning and work. He has been generously taking the lead of crafting and building on these summaries of our learning sessions. THANKS, PHILIP!)

“Begin at the beginning,” the King said, very gravely,…”

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Image by Paula Fagerberg of the six knotworking questions
Image by Paula Fagerberg of Visual Acuity

Within the larger Liberating Structures network there is a community of practice devoted to the development and understanding of Strategy Knotworking (SK), a set of six questions, often answered using various Liberating Structures (LS). SK lends itself to complex contexts and where there is a desire to engage everyone in planning. 

This is the second installment (here is the first) of takeaways from the various conversations that we have been fortunate to have with seasoned practitioners on Strategic Knotworking (SK). Today, the celebrity is Fisher Qua.

Fisher started the session by recalling the beginnings of SK, reminding us that somehow Liberating Structures do not come out of hat or fully dressed like Athena from Jupiter’s head. 

It started, he reminisced, with the incorporation of Core Prime questions as part of Celebrity Interview Riffs and Variation prompts options. Questions like : what is happening around us that demands creative adaptation? Given our purpose, what seems possible now? As for the first visual representation, it stemmed from the graphic gameplan of David Sibbet of the Grove and evolved into a mash-up of several approaches to strategy that Keith called Strategy Safari. (For the deeply process geeks, see here and here.)

Something changed for Nancy and others when she started looking at the process as a narrative weaving together the 6 questions to create a storyline that everybody could own and operate. Somewhere along the way, it got its name. Nancy wrote several blogs about it. Keith and Johannes wrote a long article, and then our community of practice got together. 

Nancy added the Ecocycle to the arrow which provided a structure to record things (questions, answers, observations, etc). At first, the idea was not to define a deliberate sequence but to use a bunch of LS to collect the responses so that people could see them.

Like most beginners I reckon, I first believed that SK was a somewhat linear process evolving from Purpose to Action and Evaluation in a series of well defined and logical steps. Listening to Fisher, Michelle, Lynda, and Barry (our other guest practitioners) I am amazed to see how malleable the structure is. The structure itself  invites a large array of questions and prompts (see Michelle’s account), and can utilize many combinations and a variety of tools. It is malleable in how it can roll out over time, from 2-3 hours to days, either in a single session or spread over time. In the case discussed by Fisher (that of a business school) the process lasted 9 months with a medley of formats and both synchronous and asynchronous work. 

Fisher’s story of a business school 

The project explored all 6 questions and included quite a large design or core team (about 20 people) bringing together concerned stakeholders: undergraduate and graduate students, business school administrative staff, a couple local business owners, a couple of alumni, and associate, adjunct and full-time faculty fulfilling the need for requisite diversity and participation and, at the same time, embodying the first principle of LS “include and unleash everyone”. 

The delivery was intricate. 

The first part aimed at gathering people’s view on the various components of the SK process (Purpose, Context, etc) To do this, the Core team was invited to self-organize into pairs or trios and were tasked to interview at least 10 people in each of the areas of SK. For example, regarding purpose, they were asked to interview 10 people using 9-Whys. The same approach was applied for Context, Challenge, etc…

A half day online workshops were planned every two weeks to harvest and make sense of the material gathered during the week. 

The second part of the project consisted of 2-day in-person sessions with rotating groups spending 3 hours at a time in structured interactions. For example, on day one, members of the business community and undergrad students came together and explored Context. In another session full-time and adjunct faculty had a chance to work on Purpose. There were other sessions where everybody came together simultaneously in the room and worked through Ecocycle. This took 2 x 3 hour half day sessions.. 

An interesting development happened around Purpose. 

It was this writer’s bias that the purpose of an organization would be one and shared by all, but in the case of the business school different stakeholders had different purposes; for example between students and faculty, but also between faculty and the representatives of the business community. One can easily imagine a desire for employability versus an interest in academic inquiry leading to different purposes. At any rate, they ended up with multiple propositions which, after some consideration, were shown to express different positions at different scales within different contexts creating a sort of stepping stone towards Panarchy. 

The same thing happened when Ecocycle was used to map the Baseline. The final result was four Ecocycles. One was Business School relationships, another Departments program, a third around different practices, a fourth related to curricular elements 

Considerations  

  • SK can not only address the main elements of strategy (purpose, context, etc…), it can do it on several scales which, as far as I know, is uncommon and much-neglected in more traditional frameworks. 
  • Ecocycle can map different things such as activities, tasks, actions etc. It can be paired with Panarchy to look at the effect of scale on a given topic and look at progression/development over time, but it can also be used to zoom in on a single item within an specific Ecocycle if it appears too large or too obscure or too complex. 

Execution is the Achilles heel

When the process ended at the business school, committees were created to carry on the actions identified in the sixth step of the SK process. But, as it were, things got “lost in translation” since nobody was willing to take operational responsibility. We had seen something similar in one of the cases that Michelle described, reminding one that if decision makers are often responsible for crafting strategy they are rarely involved or even interested in execution. This is all the more wicked that, at the outset of strategic work, the general expectation of teams and management often revolves around planning with little or no patience for introspection, connections, relations, or inquiry. 

Given this state of affair Fisher muses about the possibility to add a macrostructure that would weave execution into SK. He calls it “Strategy Knotworking and Operational Knitting.” It consists of replicating the patterns used in the strategy design phase – core team, regular cadence of meetings, structured interactions – in the implementation phase. In his words, “to make sure there is an operational “function” with the organization that can pick-up knotworking where it leaves off.” 

Practitioners like Lynda Frost use non LS strategy planning tool (in her case David La Piana’s Strategic Planning template) and a couple of follow-up meetings with the management team to ensure that actions are undertaken and monitored. And then, from  a purely LS process, we have Henri’s meeting macrostructures. AsI would be very interested to learn about other ways to provide/integrate a scaffold regarding execution within or without the realm of LS. 

Relational coordination 

There is a sense among some practitioners that SK does not really make the grade as a strategic tool or process because it lacks mechanisms for implementation and allocation of resources. Said another way, SK may be good at strategy-thinking not at strategy-doing. But is this true? 

It is indisputable that the tactical side of strategy is its ultimate validation. Without actions and measured outcomes, strategy remains a pie in the sky. But there is another side to strategy which Fisher calls relational coordination inspired by the Relational Coordination Research Collaborative at Brandeis University that few organizations pay real attention to and yet, as we shall see later, directly impacts performance.

In Fisher’s words relational coordination is “the practice of tuning into context, revisiting purpose in a way that multiple people are invited to respond, dramatically increasing people’s sense of shared awareness about themselves as a system.” “As a system…”  in other words as a complex network of agents, activities and architectures that are in fact the substrates of production and creativity. 

By increasing the density and the quality of relationships, SK also develops better adaptability and responsiveness. The strategic shift here is toward resilience as a driver of delivery. Borrowing the syntax from the Agile Manifesto, we could say “discovery and tuning into where we have a higher capacity to respond to the world around us as it changes” over process and planning. 

Secondly, if SK does not directly address how decisions are made or how resources are allocated, that does mean that we are left bereft of solutions. There are several ways to deal with this. Within the LS tool box one could, at the end of the process, add some form of project management using Purpose to Practice (P2P) or, if looking for engagement and commitment, something around What I Need From You (WINFY). 

So what makes SK so incredibly useful?

For Fisher the value of SK is not so much the answers given at any one moment of time  to the 6 questions as it is to help us ““understand the relationship of one’s work to other people’s work or one’s work to the constituencies we are working for” to quote Nancy.

Looking at SK this way induced Fisher to become less formal and to use the 6 questions more like a “set of improvisational lenses” than steps in a process. Musing on the last 9 months, he acknowledges that notwithstanding intense preparation, things never followed the intended path with the business school. One reason is that perception varies within the ranks of an organization, and so you work out a detailed agenda with one constituency only to find out that it does not apply to another.  

In this context, the robustness of the process is provided by the quality of the conversations, hence the importance of questions. What is really useful becomes a good library of prompts from which one can retrieve the right trigger at any moment anywhere in the process. Focusing on prompts rather than steps improves the relational capabilities of the group and helps circumvent resistances. 

For example “(If) this group isn’t going to tolerate talking about purpose”, Fisher says, (…) here’s two ways of inviting them to consider purpose without calling it purpose. Right? so that becomes a Conversation Cafe topic. Here’s a group arguing about their shared portfolio, but they don’t have a language of portfolios. And so we’re going to do an Ecocycle to baseline the portfolio of investments.(…) and to conclude “it just becomes a much less structured practice and much more like fluid.” 

Relational coordination is the second pillar of strategy 

I mentioned Fisher’s disappointment with the lack of execution that followed the 9-month work he did with the business school. And indeed, this echoes the experience of many practitioners leading to doubt SK as a full-fledged strategic tool. While we can bemoan this state of affair, things are no better with a traditional strategic plan. The difference is that their actions are undertaken – usually with great ponderousness and miscommunication –  only to be found inappropriate down the line.  

Listening to Fisher I came to the conclusion that there is another side to strategy than setting goals and listing actions. As it happens this is not only my opinion. Keith referred to Jody Hoffer Gittell’s research on what she also calls relational coordination and to her conclusions that indeed it impacts performance (operations). Two remarks follow from this. One is the fact that, to quote Keith, “there are not many mechanisms in lots of organizations where that stuff is built into the fabric.” Second, this aspect of strategy cannot be top-down which may explain its absence in most companies. The reason it cannot be a top down affair is that relational coordination does not fit hierarchical models, it feeds on networks. 

Of course Jody Hoffer Gittell’s attributes of relational coordination are not identical to the 6 questions of SK. Hers are: mutual respect, shared goals, shared knowledge, as well as frequent, timely and accurate communication but it is hard not to see that SK definitely addresses all of them in one form or another.

Once Upon a Time I Wrote a Thing

Screenshot of Nancy's paper from 2006 on the Knowledge Tree publication.

A recent email from the wonderful Alan Levine (a.k.a. cogdog, with his still-vibrant CogDogBlog) reminded me that once upon a time, I wrote a thing. What feels like forever-ago in 2006.

Thanks to the Wayback Machine, it can still be read. I was optimistic about online communities then. I don’t recall if term “social media” had ascended yet. It was after the first Internet bust and into the second bubble, where things were beginning to shift toward what I now recognize as full on commodification. Most of us hadn’t yet realized we, and and our digital traces, were turning into products for businesses to sell.

But I was still hopeful because of the amazing people I met. First there was the incredible Northern Voice blogging confab in Vancouver, BC. I connected to a fabulous network of folks in education who were experimenting with tech, specifically blogs. They were young, excited and our conversations about online community (me) and blogging communities (them) intersected with a glorious BANG! We floated ideas of any stripe, outrageous or not. We shared openly.

Eventually, I wrote about it.

Online community has been an important part of the Internet, mainly forming around email lists, bulletin boards and forums. In recent years, the ascendancy of blogs has introduced a new platform for communities. This article looks at some of the emerging patterns of blog based communities and raises some questions for their strategic application.

If you want, you can read it —>whiteDownload

Community continues to be reshaped by not just technology, but society, climate change, positive and negative groups of people. And, in the end, it is fundamentally about connecting, not just consuming content. I try to stay positive! What about you?

Perfection as Control

I was reading the spectacular, “When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice” by Terry Tempest Williams and this quote jumped out at me.

A rendition of a robin made out of metal and old buttons

 “Perfection is a flaw disguised as control.”

Terry Tempest Williams

I’ve been working on a writing project with Keith McCandless around Liberating Structures and time and time again we reflect on how control shows up. Perfection is one of the ways. When trying to work with emergent ideas, this is a huge, wet blanket.

Image of a rock outcropping into a bay with oystercatcher birds landing

Guest Post: Rewilding Strategy Knotworking

Introduction: I am happy to share the blog space with guest author Philip Clark along with Michelle Laurie sharing some of the learnings of our little CoP on strategy knotworking. You can read their bios at the end of the post! 

Image of the Knotworking process with six questions looping iteratively forward

From Philip: Special thanks to Nancy, Lynda, Fisher, Michelle, Barry, Susan

The strategy game starts with being honest with yourself.

Simon Wardley

Within the larger Liberating Structures network there is a community of practice devoted to the development and understanding of Strategy Knotworking, a set of six questions, often answered using various Liberating Structures, that lends itself to complex contexts and where there is a desire to engage everyone in planning. 

Late in 2023 we started doing a series of Users Experience Fishbowls with seasoned practitioners to hear their stories, learn from them and share their experience with our community at large. So far, we have had the pleasure to talk to Lynda Frost, Fisher Qua, Michelle Laurie, and Barry Overeem. We also had the chance to listen in on a presentation Keith McCandless did of a knotworking case of his own. It started a few months back when Keith went on a tour of LS communities presenting a case study about Strategy Knotworking (SK).

The amount of wisdom, heuristics, different usages and details provided by our guests is substantial and will take some time to digest. All our sessions are recorded, all have transcripts. You can access these materials via our # Knotworking group on Slack (leave a comment with your email below and Nancy will invite you) and our GoogleDrive folder (https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1573AmVQpJhQW20UgbTqLvwVfiHIhUNfp)  

One of the sessions that resonated with me was Michelle Laurie’s. Here are a few nuggets I have found particularly enlightening.

Michelle’s work takes place in particularly complex environments where her clients can include communities, local and regional governments, non-profit organizations, etc… The specificity here is that multiple players have multiple objectives.  There are also trust issues. Building trust is an important foundation to collaborative planning and, for Michelle, you won’t be surprised to discover, strategic in nature. More of this in a minute. 

About strategy

Michelle described three different cases. One thing they had in common is that you rarely start with a blank page. In other words, some strategic elements can be relatively stable over time which implies that the past is as important as the future.  

Another thing common to all three was the importance of preparation. All of them needed lot’s of it. The more you prepare, the easier and nimble the delivery (especially if you need to adapt quickly). The trick is to have it done by the client as much as possible. 

Knotworking offers a structure through the use of six questions: 1) What is the purpose of our work? 2) What is happening around us that demands change. 3) What challenges and wicked questions must we face to achieve our purpose? 4) Where are we starting, honestly? 5) Based on what we have just learned, what is now made possible? 6) What are we going to do, what are the next steps and how will we know we are making progress? (Yes, that is actually three questions. Smiley face.)

In Michelle’s work with a hospital the planning team was small, aligned, and had their projects placed “in neat tidy buckets” prior to the strategic workshop. In other words, they were clear about their strategic initiatives and needed a way to prioritize them. The novelty here was both the strategic process itself and their first experience with digital tools (as a consequence of the pandemic). Given both the cohesiveness of the team and the work previously done, the strategic process went smoothly. The team did not have a purpose, so they started with that. 

They then addressed context and challenges by answering  the prompt “What do we need to be aware of when considering strategies / actions for the year ahead?” That readied them to analyze the pre-prepared set electronic stickies to assess the current projects and activities for current baseline state. Actions were determined by a voting process according to the following options : must do, love to do, like to do, not really interested. In this example, although the projects and the criteria for evaluation had been discussed prior to the SK workshop, the team gained clarity reflecting together on purpose, context, challenges, and baseline. 

The strategic process was fairly rapid and summative. The benefit was to reinforce coherence, provide details and range of possible work of the various projects as well as enrich the connection between the members of the team. All things considered : clean, fast, enjoyable.

About trust

Michelle remarks that when you have to deal with large partnerships, trust is a critical issue. The fact that these teams or people have few interactions and identify with different constituencies reinforces their insularity. It makes it difficult to grasp and elaborate something that could be called, after Dan Simmon’s “Hyperion”, the space that binds, a space where new things, new thoughts, new actions can emerge in a manner that matters to all the constituents. That space is strategy.

If trust is lacking it must be built. This means flexibility with the process. The great skill here is letting go. Before strategizing, before talking about purpose, context, etc … seek what Stuart Kaufmann calls “the adjacent possible.” Look for that which is within reach, not necessarily what we want or desire. So the pattern seems to be “go with the flow”;  go where there is readiness, eagerness, curiosity and energy. Sometimes it is just the act of talking with each other that matters. Be ready to leave the plan aside, to put the process on hold, and just let it roll, like they say in the movies when they start shooting. It is hard for those of us who believe in the goodness of a structured process, or in the generative power of a well-constructed narrative, but sometimes you’ll have to let go.

In terms of strategy, Michelle discovered that trust is not just between the project stakeholders, but also between stakeholders and the community. The importance of connectedness and leadership in the community created indirectly helps project partners’ work succeed. Within the project partnership, shared visible artifacts are needed: as Michelle says “something written and seen that allows people to see where everyone’s at, (something) you can take (…) back to your organization. Something you can come back to, (…) to ground you”. The document is the output but the discussions, relationship building and sensemaking to get the document are the true outcomes. Panarchy or Ecocycle Planning are natural candidates to support the process.

With this in mind, Michelle was able to introduce a new strategic direction called « Integration and Building understanding » as a process made to avoid the trap of falling back into silos once the workshop ended. This also implied that the strategic plan was going to include actions that addressed this new strategic direction.

Reflections on the 6 phases of SK

  1. “Purpose” is important albeit not always sought after. If you are like Michelle, Lynda, Fisher, Barry you’ll push for it. 
  1. In one situation, “Context” was expressed not by answering the classical prompt of “what is happening around you that demands change?” but by tapping into the narratives about the organisation’s history. When you are lucky to still have people who have been a long time in the organisation together with many layers of new people, and that what had been good and specific to the culture of the organisation vanished, devoting time recalling how things were can be a remarkable way to look at the present and a nice trampoline for the future. 
  1. “Challenges” can be different things to different people. Michelle has a nice way to describe them when she says that “they are anything (my underlining) that people or team need to be talked about to help the strategic plan or the group work better together.” For example, challenges could take the form of a retrospective about a project in progress.
  1. “Baseline” refers to the current situation. There are many ways to describe it and Michelle uses Ecocycle Planning extensively as the best way to map a variety of things (activities, states, projects, etc…) dynamically.
  1. “Ambitions” were not clear for Michelle. It looked to her like the transition from Baseline to Ambition and Action and Evaluation was not as straightforward as that. Nancy jumped in and clarified this step. Ambition is based on everything that was discovered in questions 1 through 4. It is about having conversations that could start with “what if?,” conversations about what to trade off, about what matters now or even what is the most important thing we want to do together. It is more of a generative exercise, versus a planning approach which is the 6th question.
  1. Three things about “Action and Evaluation.” One, this is where everyone wants to be. Two, because usually much time is devoted to the previous phases of the SK process, this stage can often be hurried. Not a good idea. Three, because strategy is led by decision-makers, and this step is about execution, it is important to have the right people in the room, those good at operations and to make sure the baton is smoothly passed.

A common tendency while doing strategy is to want  to jump immediately to the planning phase. To answer the question, what are we going to do? Will we do this, or do that? Look into this, or study that? This bias toward action tends to take a lot of strategic elements like purpose, context, challenges, even the current state for granted. It minimizes or triggers forms of restlessness with other critical aspects of strategy such as the quality and the role of relations or a finer and more appropriate awareness of the situation. Hence the wicked question: “how can we address the need for action while developing rich and meaningful connections.  

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Our Guest Author Team

Philip Clark:.  After running his company -a digital design firm – for 10 years, and the innovation department of Orange Business Services, Philip now teaches innovation and change  at the university of Applied Science in Lausanne Switzerland. He also facilitates organizational transformation with a special emphasis on complexity designed tools and methods (Liberating Structures, Cynefin, Estuarine, Sensemaker…) promoting collective intelligence and distributed leadership. Contact Philip to collaborate and share ideas (https://www.linkedin.com/in/philip-evans-clark/)  

Michelle Laurie: For more than twenty years Michelle Laurie has worked with leading agencies around the world to achieve their sustainability goals. She facilitates multi-stakeholder dialogue, strategic design of networks and partnerships, and supports projects related to global change, health and the environment. She is a big proponent of participatory process, collaboration and engagement. She began experimenting with Strategy Knotworking in 2019 and continues to do so whenever the opportunity arises. Contact Michelle to collaborate and share ideas (feel free to link my site michellelaurie.com and/ or LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/michellelaurie/).

If you are interested in Strategic Knotworking, leave a message for Nancy with your email and she will send an invite!